July, 2010

A great week recovering from a massive internal conference and getting to learn what this Microsoft place is all about. With my chip firmly implanted (there is no chip by the way. I’m Joking. No I’m not. Yes I am) I’m getting into swing. Most of this week I’ve spent delving into Intune and setting up my new demo beast…a Core i7 720 8GB monster from HP…un-boxing coming soon, when I can find my camera. So with that most of this week was fun stuff rather than technical depth.

Andrew Fryer, my team mate and fellow IT Pro evangelist has posted a great article on why he likes VHDs. I have to agree with him and I’ll add something else…

VHDs are a file based format as opposed to the traditional sector based format. This is very cool because it allows “offline servicing” for the OS, which means that you can service the VHD without it being booted. This is cool because say you have a demo environment and you want to update a driver all you do is mount the VHD and use DISM like this:

DISM /Image:V:\ /Add-Driver /Driver:M:\Drivers /recurse

to add the driver, then on next boot it’s done. Simples.

More complicated is what’s going on under the hood, but essentially a VHD will consume less disk space than the same disk in a sector based format as each unique file is only stored once in the VHD format.

When I first started out one of the things that I did to get real world understanding (as opposed to at an Academic institution which is invaluable too but very different) was to get stuck into getting Microsoft Certified. Back then MCSE was my goal and I did it entirely through self study, reading and doing. That was on NT4 and I upgraded everything to 2000 through a single (and really hard!) exam. Since then I’ve been doing BETA exams, 254 questions in one sitting was a bit much though, and kept things current. Things have changed a bit now but getting certified is really valuable.

The videos we’ve produced and put up on landthegig.com are very extreme but I’m pretty sure I’ve interviewed a couple of these guys….

As usual this is my weekly wrap up of all the stuff I’ve posted to my blogs over the past week, a week where I was at a massive internal conference that was super awesome (you won’t believe what this picture is) All the following were pre-posted, so nothing overly topical but some fun stuff, like mad-as-a-bag-of-frogs coffee and some really good pointers to great office resources.

What’s on the cards for this week….InTune (hopefully), more on Windows 7 deployment and a little BPOS and probably some random stuff as well as some Atlantan thoughts and the usual helping of off topic fun.

The Office 2010 Engineering blog posted a great roundup of the tools that you can use to help deploy Office 2010 this week. It’s a powerful tool set and I honestly can’t see a blocker to deployment that it doesn’t help remove.

You don’t know what addins are out there…there’s a tool for that.

Don’t know if you VBA code is compatible it 2010…there’s a tool for that.

Want it in your standard image…there’s a tool for that.

Want to customise what lands on a client…there’s a tool for that.

Want help planning deployment…there’s a tool for that.

Want someone to get your coffee whilst you deploy Office 2010…you might have to do that yourself!